@HWalters, x-phi is fine as long as you realize that it may be culturally conditioned. Descartes' res cogitans was, as far as I can tell, very like LFW. Many people seemed down with his res cogitans and there are plenty of people today struggling mightily to get academicians to admit that evolution may have shaped our cognition, predisposing us to act some ways more than others. But this can be taken back much further, to those who argued about whether our actions are fated.

But I want to get back to your "It is not logically possible to show anything empirical to be false"; I don't understand your purpose behind that statement. Intuition can be wrong; an excellent example is whether heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects (controlling for air resistance profile). If an explanation (e.g. CFW) rules nothing out or less probable, then it explains nothing.

@labreuer I assume your second comment was directed to Conifold

I've no problems with your first comment, at all; a lot of x-phi suggests for example that most people have compatibilist intuitions, but I wouldn't even take "most" for granted precisely for that reason (without a lot more rigor in x-phi)... which is why at best I simply claim that there are a large number of people with compatibilist intuitions

@HWalters Let me start with intuitions. That there are CFW mechanisms in our brain is a platitude, that some instinctive actions are rationalized ex post facto was recognized since before Freud, and Libet-type experiments provides plentiful evidence of confabulated intentions. Libertarians like Kane specifically restrict manifestations of FW to "torn decisions", etc. We do not need "compatibilist intuitions" to affirm CFW mechanisms, indeed we know of them acting pace the opposite intuitions.

The nontrivial claim of compatibilism is that CFW accounts for all of it. It is conceivable that AI research will reveal that LFW is physically possible and neuroscience will demonstrate that we lack it. I am not aware of anyone who takes such a possibility seriously, and it would render current debates moot. You can look at Mackie's Ethics, or Dennett's Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want, or Mele's Free Will and Luck.

Much of the debate is driven by moralizing about what we "want" or "need" FW to be for ethics, etc. But such considerations, and therefore most "intuitions" on both sides, are irrelevant to the ontological question, which I take the OP to ask. Where the FW ontology is concerned (social psychology and ethics are another story), cognitive psychology and neuroscience data, combined with semiotic and AI modeling are far more credible than culturally conditioned feels, even statistically averaged.

So I will simply deny that "it's through our intuitions that we understand what free will is and isn't", or at least that we should do so. Beyond that the chief objection to folk libertarianism is that taken at face value it is incoherent either by itself or when combined with physics. Compatibilism is a cheap way out, it amounts to saying that what LFW models strive to capture needs no capturing (the situation with consciousness is similar). And it may be right.

But solutions tend to be preferred to dissolutions if they can be had. I am not saying that the moment a viable LFW model is proposed compatibilism will go out the window, but the power of intuitions is fleeting. Paraphrasing Planck, those with the old ones die out and the next generation grows with new ones. Personally, I believe the current debate is marred by unfamiliarity of most participants on both sides with non-classical physics.

Not in the sense of specifics, but their general lines of reasoning about causality, chance, identity, etc., clearly follow Kantian, if not Aristotelian, stereotypes. And we already know that satisfactory integration of a subject into natural science along those lines is hopeless. Even if QM plays no role physically it gives a new vocabulary for the subject/object interaction, which is little utilized. So compatibilism and libertarianism are both likely to be more wrong than right.

@labreuer Intuition can be wrong, but this wrongness is not established "logically", logic is simply a wrong standard for empirical science. Empirical claims can be confirmed or infirmed, adopted or abandoned, but as Quine said "any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system". And for adopting, epistemic conditions (simplicity, fruitfulness, unification, availability of alternatives) play as much of a role as "facts" and "logic".

@HWalters: My bad, my second comment was directed to @Conifold.

Conifold: What is free will?

@Conifold I don't quite know where you're going, unless you are utterly discarding Popperian falsification? He was aware of the bit you quoted from Quine, in the form of ad hoc hypotheses.

@Conifold "The nontrivial claim of compatibilism is that CFW accounts for all of it." ← I agree with that. But we have to ask whether that's an empirical "all" or a logical "all".

You can establish definitions all you want, but at the end of the day, there's this thing most people feel that they're doing; there's a sense of control they feel they have, and if you dig a bit deeper into cognitive science than "Libet experience" you get a sense of where this comes from. I'm not really that concerned here with whether they reflect reality...

...but there's at least a point of view Libet et al seem to be ignoring; in particular, a huge amount of that debate is focused on something we don't even really "seem" to do; the notion that we "consciously" decide to do things

Ignoring Libet and just focusing on cog sci for a sec, for example, there's an actual basis for a "sense of control" which isn't even necessarily conscious; in fact, many types of "willed acts" we tend to not even be aware of until something goes wrong

Roughly the way this seems to work is that there are processes in our brains that perform plans (schemas) for how to attain some sort of goal; within such purpose-oriented behaviors there are predictions about what would happen if those are carried out. During an action, so long as things are reasonably close to those plans, everything is "normal"; when they diverge greatly, there's a huge shift of focus on what's happening

(e.g., when you "get up to walk", start moving, and notice that your leg's asleep)

All this has to do with the art of volition, but it's related to things like sense of control

And it's from such sensations that, likely, concepts such as free will arise

Libet experiments per se are great information (and all of the followups); confabulation definitely does happen (but then again, we also have visual illusions); but we also unconsciously practice teleological behaviors

It's a bit simplistic to just ignore compatibilist intuitions, say that they "shouldn't" matter, and "all" we have to do is focus on something you just vaguely refer to as "the ontology"

Also, it's a bit of a minor point, but technically your proposed view that compatiblism is a reaction to apparent determinism in conventional biology is anachronistic by a few millennea.

(Though Chrysippus's compatibilist views are a bit... interesting... and he was reacting to apparent determinism of a sort)

Is there anyone who won't allow that a good deal of what the brain does is not conscious but more based on habit, or a kind of mental momentum? The question would be whether that covers everything. See @Conifold's "The nontrivial claim of compatibilism is that CFW accounts for all of it."

youtube.com/watch?v=_rZfSTpjGl8 <- searle's view fwiw

Having fun with the chat not having sensible lightweight markup, eh? example (example)[example.com] example.com → syntax is the same as questions/answers, not comments

Bah, I'd rather sometimes for certain links that the link per se just be shown; youtube specifically

I'm inclined to say it is more interesting to examine where we don't seem to have free will, e.g. akrasia. In science, it is common to understand a system better by understanding how it breaks down, what causes it to stop functioning correctly or at least function differently.

Anyway, yes... I think we need to (culturally) evolve past the point to where we think "consciousness" is where "we" are; it certainly doesn't work for volition, and on reflection it simply doesn't match what we seem to do from a first view perspective (e.g., I form "sentences" not by consciously picking the word, but by "intending" them to be some thing... the words seem to just magically flow into consciousness real time)

(Yes, I'm aware that "correctly" is a loaded term; see e.g. SEP: Concepts of Health and Disease.)

"The nontrivial claim of compatibilism is that CFW accounts for all of it." <- this really sounds like an overstatement. I'm not aware of compatibilists that, for example, seriously propose that we never confabulate. I'm aware you're just pitting this against LFW, but if you're really focused on the ontology, we shouldn't even care where the debate is

@HWalters X and human intuitions about X are two different subjects, studied by different sciences for different purposes. If the OP is interested in a model of human free will intuitions then I misunderstood the question, otherwise they are at best suggestive fodder for creating models, not something models answer to.

For that purpose both compatibilist and libertarian intuitions are to be ignored except when independently supported. If you are suggesting that compatibilism is driven by accomodating intuitions I have no quarrel with that, but that is not the side of compatibilism I am talking about.

I'm … not so sure I meant to slice things so cleanly. And I'm not sure that is possible in this case; see for example "We shall maintain that the most important metascientific concepts with which philosophy deals, such as cause, law, explanation, theory, evidence, natural necessity, and the like, have not been shown to be capable of adequate characterisation in wholly formal terms." (Causal Powers, 2–3)

I should include the next sentence: "We hold that adequate accounts of those concepts which are neither purely formal nor simply psychological can be achieved by attention to the third element in our intellectual economy, namely the content of our knowledge, content which goes beyond the reports of immediate experience."

I think more precisely what I'm suggesting is that our concept of having or not having free will is based on what we observe about ourselves in large part; and this includes both philosophers and non-philosophers. That's just "FW" unqualified.

In general, to declare intuitions completely irrelevant is to sunder yourself from experienced reality. I don't see how doing so could possibly help resolve matters with regard to free will. But I'm happy with a dialectic where sometimes one focuses more on the ontology and sometimes one focuses more on the intuitions. But you can't just ignore the connection between intuitions and ontology.

Ok, but does that concept—unqualified as it is—**exclude** any states of affairs? Or does it kinda explain everything and therefore really explain nothing?

Whether that FW that we do have, if we do, is compatibilist or incompatibilist depends on what that thing is and how it works. If it works like a classical computer it's compatibilist. If it involves things like "die tosses" it could be called libertarian.

@labreuer This is part of why I haven't bothered posting an answer. I could go a compatibilist route, with an eliminative materialist-like bent on it, bypassing many concerns of Libet and actually matching things such as volition mechanics, and propose that our "self" extends beyond our consciousness

That almost makes things entirely unfalsifiable; there is a requirement that somehow the driving forces of behaviors need to be in some sense "goal-oriented", teleological so to speak

But I wouldn't rule it out as completely meaningless unless we first address an extended version of the self

I think a theory along these lines actually has the most "risk" of being true given what we know, but also carries a big risk of simply meaningless

You might have fun trying to completely and exhaustively define "determine". My point here is to say that it isn't necessarily exclusively CFW or LFW. Or it is on pain of CFW becoming rather ill-defined.

So I would lean more towards the EM camp and just study the thing a bit more, reshaping our views as the evidence comes out

(Who says that the current fundamental laws of physics are the only ways that change can occur?)

WRT an extended version of the self, if you mean something like The Extended Mind, I agree. I'm reading René Girard these days and his focus on _mimesis_—our desires are largely formed by copying others—greatly challenges the Enlightenment vision of an autonomous self.

And yet, history does move forward; people do occasional do new things. So maybe we could view it as habits and humans finding themselves in systems they ultimately learn to game, producing new systems that they have to live in for a while before learning how to game them as well. But this leaves an active element, a role for something which doesn't seem like CFW, at least to me.

labreuer: I wasn't exactly talking about that, though that's an interesting angle. I was more talking about a refined definition of self that surrounds more than just "consciousness"; something that includes that "thing we can't consciously see" for example...

As a rough litmus test, we tend to feel like we're at least a bit "in charge" of our thoughts; at the very least, like they actually are ours. But certain people have different senses; some feel it harder to focus; some find the stream of thoughts go everywhere. Possibly if we could account for this in terms of an integrated self or disorder of self that would indicate a decent theory.

You remind me of Jonathan Haidt's elephant & rider metaphor, e.g. in The Righteous Mind.

I had to look that up; interesting

But we might ask whether intelligence can even exist without a big part of it having a good deal of momentum. Voluntarism—doxastic and otherwise—isn't necessarily a coherent concept.

Hmmm... do you know anything about chess AI? (Not details; just roughly what the "players" are)

More specifically... are you aware of what stockfish is, and have you heard of Alpha Zero?

Stockfish was the leading chess engine up to about last year. It implements a type of minimax with a really deep search tree; and supports an open book (database of opening moves). The algorithms it uses to judge the quality of a position are heuristic...

...that's kind of worth mentioning as a rough metaphor for "habit"; basically, stockfish's way of playing chess is based on "human theory"

Alpha Zero is based on google's reasonably old "deep learning" mechanics; this is still a different kind of approach from "traditional" neural nets. But DL is a generic algorithm. Last year google held a contest between an A0 basically taught only the rules of chess, and then self training 4 hours, and stockfish

That's a rough metaphor for "new things", since A0 was given no heuristics whatsoever (neither how to score a position nor an opening book)

A0 was pitted in a 100 game match against stockfish fairly recently, with 28 wins, 72 draws, 0 losses. And its method of playing seems a lot more "human" than stockfish.

I don't think that necessarily indicates anything, but it's just an interesting tidbit

@HWalters Nope, but I know a bit about algorithms and write a lot of software, primarily fancy database stuff

That's a pretty interesting result, but I'm not sure how it maps to humans, who clearly are born with a lot of preprogrammed cognitive machinery, even if the preprogramming is more like tendencies and predispositions than strict determination

I'm not sure "preprogrammed" is quite the right word, though it's not entirely wrong

It's kind of a strange "middle ground"

Roughly by that I mean that our brains tend to organize the same kind of way; but in certain cases where entire subsystems that would organize a particular kind of way can't be used, those areas of the brain simply take on unrelated tasks

And now I'm just realizing you basically just said the same thing anyway

AI NN technology's not really a great model of the human brain; "traditional" NN's (convolutional NN's for example) are extremely slow learners compared to us, and aren't as generic as we are. Google's DL approach is much better model (in terms of speed of learning and genericity), but it's not exactly a brain simulator

Hmmm, Stockfish didn't have its open book. That seems a bit unfair. More at chess.com/news/view/…

Anyhow, where does this all leave us?

I've suggested that human consciousness has a lot of momentum but that this doesn't commit one to some limited kind of determination, e.g. some maximally complex set of mathematical patterns for how change happens. I've suggested that if CFW can account for any kind of determination whatsoever—even God doing things—then it's very ill-defined. This takes us away from your current line of discussion, but possibly CFW assumes that matter–energy is more fundamental than consciousness?

A consequence of matter–energy being more fundamental than consciousness would be, I think, that causation has limited complexity and that there are some systems we will never learn to game (as AlphaZero gamed Stockfish). If we can always game whatever system there is, then how could causation have limited complexity?

@labreuer CFW doesn't even require determinism at all. Consider traditional computers; they behave very deterministically by design. Even under a non-deterministic QM interpretation, computers would still be "deterministic-like"; when computers are doing something we might simply call "working properly", they behave in a deterministic fashion

Compatibilism proper is simply the idea that FW is compatible with determinism, not that the universe is deterministic. CFW is simply a FW whose mechanics occur in a deterministic fashion, not necessarily FW in a deterministic universe

Ok, but then don't we shove off the non-deterministic stuff as "noise" and not something which can be analyzed? I'm reminded of Popper's "Every experimental physicist knows those surprising and inexplicable apparent 'effects' which in his laboratory can perhaps even be reproduced for some time, but which finally disappear without trace."

One common compatibilist argument is that free will must involve determinism because without it, there's no way to claim an agent was the cause of a decision

Yes, and my immediate response to the compatibilist is to request a definition of "determinism"

The standard definition of determinism is apt, but I think in regards to compatibilism it requires a bit more nuance. That definition being, "every effect has an antecedent cause". The nuance is that we're talking about a particular set of mechanics, not the entire universe

All too often, I find that "determinism" is really a cipher for "time-evolution of physical, impersonal state"; it excludes multiple agents with true causal powers interacting with each other. There is a baked-in reductionism. And yet, the word supposedly covers all possible kinds of causation.

Compatibilism is often defined as the supposition that FW and determinism are compatible

Well imagine a traditional computer with inputs. Those inputs could be entirely non-deterministic. But when the computer performs a computation, that would be deterministic. With regard to FW, typically we're talking about the mechanics of making a "choice"

I'm not going to define "choice" per se; most of the time it's focused on selecting between alternatives, but there's also on occasion inclusion of acting on one of the choices, so I'll leave that one a bit vague

A traditional computer is a Turing machine, which is a very specific mathematical formalism. I'm not willing to admit that all causation can be properly modeled by Turing machines, although I am happy to say that Turing machines can simulate anything to ever-increasing accuracy.

But that simulation might be akin to a Taylor series approximation to a repeating signal; if one looks at the example on Wikipedia, one can see that successive approximation doesn't necessarily yield a limit which is of the same kind as what you use for the successive approximation.

Or as Robert Rosen writes in Life Itself, "the limit of a sequence of mechanisms need not be a mechanism" (xvii).

If you're talking about signals, we could relate that to QM in terms of the wavefunction. The Schrodinger equation specifies how the wavefunction evolves; per that, the evolution of the wavefunction is entirely deterministic (previous states entirely determine the current state), so in principle that could be computed with a TM

The limiting factor here is that we don't really know the parameters of the wavefunction. In non-determinstic interpretations of QM, the real non-deterministic factor occurs as a result of the Born rule, which happens when a measurement's taken

Sure, if you want to posit that QM is complete. But that's problematic in my view, for a number of reasons (problems accounting for wavefunction collapse, Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics Lie, and others).

Actually, QM properly doesn't say whether the universe is deterministic or not

It would appear that you are advocating the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle. But that's probably just another way of framing my question about what would falsify CFW. :-)

Particular QM interpretations would claim it is. Some interpretations don't have a measurement problem; some are straight up deterministic

@HWalters Sure, and these days physicists prefer to use Ockham's razor and arrive at indeterministic models even though de Broglie–Bohm mechanics reproduce every known experimental QM result.

But then with QM I will side with Bernard d'Espagnat when he says "It is not infrequently (and quite rightly) stressed that the (orthodox) quantum formalism is predictive rather than descriptive." (On Physics and Philosophy, 99–100)

MWI nowadays in mainstream... and is deterministic. Copenhagen is also mainstream, and agnostic. There's a table that's pretty decent in the wiki article on interpretations of quantum mechanics

I'm not sure the determinism/indeterminism matter is actually important; pure randomness doesn't buy you much of anything in the free will debate and IIRC this is generally recognized by now.

...which claims Copenhagen isn't deterministic, so I'll quibble with that

Some LFW proponents would disagree, though I admit I've never been able to quite grasp their arguments

I am convinced that the real matter is the definition of "determinism", of what that definition excludes from possibility.

So I'd be happy to contend that, except in this context, where Conifold proposed an LFW model somehow being developed that was coherent

I think in regard to FW it's meant to describe the particular mechanics of selecting an alternative and/or acting upon a selection

And again I'd like to keep this vague enough to cover what I believe the general arguments are

Just to sufficiently scramble your intuitions on QM I'd recommend this Veritasium video (and maybe this commentary on it)

Also measurement per se being taken into your theories suffers from the measurement problem; I think the most proper way to address QM's deterministic/indeterministic nature isn't to fall on one side under OR, but to simply accept that the jury's still out

...though I'm happy to entertain indeterminism as a possibility in discussions, since at least relative to our classical world the BR works in practice

Cool video; I was aware of de Broglie–Bohm mechanics and oil droplets, but it's a nice explanation and the Mario tube-noise on tunneling was PERFECT. :-D

As to the question of selecting alternatives, I think we must deal with that, because humans can do something very interesting: they can "game" any formal system they encounter. Or at least, they can as far as we know, and any attempt to prove that there is some formal system they cannot game would, I suggest, give them exactly what they need to go on and game it.

If humans can … tunnel out of any potential well they find themselves in, then we need a way of talking about that. But it's not going to be according to some bigger formal system! Instead, it'll have to be a different kind of talking. This relates to my Causal Powers excerpt.

Can you explain more what you mean by game a formal system?

Have you ever interacted with children who are told a rule and then go on to find clever ways to violate it in letter but obey it in spirit, or violate it in spirit and obey it in letter?

Sure

But I'm not so sure those rules are formal systems; is there a better analogy?

(Or put another way, I have a problem relating to such rules as formal systems)

There, I'm trying to get at a dichotomy between analytic thinking and some other kind of thinking (I hesitate to call it "Continental"). One is the letter of the law, another the spirit. But I could do with better examples.

Something like connotation/denotation related to rules?

Another example would be how no matter what the regulations for the free market, someone will find a way to violate others' expectations and make a bunch of money; sometimes this will be called "scamming". The legal system has to work more formally than actors are allowed to act.

If you want strict reasoning, I might have to speak in terms of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and how any [sufficiently complex] formal system will be able to describe true statements it cannot prove to be true.

Stepping back, humans seem to have this ability to reflect on any system of patterns (I'm loosening up a bit from "formal system") and act on the totality of the system instead of being permanently caught up in it. This causes many problems, but it also renders any attempt to come up with a permanent and final description of them impossible.

Isaac Asimov plays with this in his Foundation series, via psychohistory. The idea is that humans learn to predict the behavior of quadrillions of humans spread across millions of planets. But for those predictions to be maximally accurate, it is super-important not to tell anyone outside the secret predicting cabal what those predictions are.

Godel may work better; regarding the legal system restrictions they seem a lot less formal to me, and our "capacity" to "game" such systems could be viewed on the other side of the coin as our "inability" to restrict results to desired parameters

Hmmm... that... is it roughly the same kind of thing that I argue is more mundane than human experience here?

I guess another way to say what I'm trying to get across is that humans seem to have the ability to tunnel out of any potential well used to try and corral them. Perhaps the very act of successfully describing that potential well (e.g. a definition of 'determinism' with a theory of how humans make choices) is what allows them to tunnel out.

...there I'm simply arguing for evitability in determinism, and proposing that all it takes is a very simple mechanics

Analogously regarding that post, "fatalism" in that regard would be the well; "determinism" would be the formal system. But here I'm simply distinguishing the two; it sounds very much like your Foundation analog

Honestly, fatalism seems like the viewpoint it is tempting to hold just before humans have figured out how to tunnel. :-) Because it looks like whatever clever strategy people use, the tragedy happens. And so many the tragedy is fated to happen.

My point in bringing up formal systems is that for some people, the ideal explanation of how humans make choices is to come up with a formal system that perfectly predicts what choices humans will make. If thinking on free will presupposes that such an ideal is coherent, then it's worth asking whether in fact that ideal is coherent—or at least, under what conditions it is coherent.

That sounds like it comes back to x-phi a bit :)

Oh sure; I'm fascinated by the pragmatic results from discussions like this; I'm really only happy to wander into abstraction built on abstraction if there are breadcrumbs to return to intuitively experienced reality.

One of the interesting things in [late] modernity is how free people are supposed to feel, and how not-free they often end up feeling. It's a fascinating conundrum I have studied for some time; one result of that is that we're n00bs at understanding how 'institutions' work and this makes us often feel powerless to change things (e.g. improve public education).

Another interesting thing is that moral philosophy has moved away from thinking in terms of "being a good person" and toward "doing the right thing"; this couples with political liberalism and rational choice theory in that we're supposed to not really theorize about what's deepest inside a person, as that would be to abridge his/her freedom.

But the perverse result of that is that we have worse and worse understanding of how we came to be who we are. We think we're autonomous individuals while the best advertising executives can tell a lot about you because they've learned to manipulate people quite well. Lack of understanding also makes us feel like our actions are determined by forces outside our control.

Tackling things from yet another perspective, we have Charles Taylor's description of the era of discipline and "Locke's Punctual Self" in Sources of the Self; we Westerners decided that self-control was the be-all and end-all. But taken to its logical conclusion this means voluntarism and that, I have argued, is incoherent.

We definitely learn behaviors from our environment, largely culturally

Heh, that's very similar to a conversation I had recently; my interlocutor suggested ["I think an [intelligent alien] with access to sufficiently advanced technology might well be able to predict what we're going to do in every situation."](blog.rongarret.info/2017/11/…). I challenged him to give that prediction to the humans.

@HWalters I think it's plausible that Jeremy did act according to his free will. But that might be because I think our consciences actually work better than we want to admit, and thus we get hints that we're headed down a bad path, hints which we can choose to heed or ignore.

76% of 21 people would agree (slightly mocking the rigor)

Note that I'm relying on a kind of prediction in my response. My understanding of free will requires us to be able to work off of predictions. Robert Kane talks of "dual rationality" and how you have to be informed about both (2+) decisions and find them each similarly compelling.

@HWalters here's where I would use a rolling eyes emoji :-p

I'm too old school for that; I avoid emoticons because they're often converted to those silly emoji

yes me too

From Richard Double in The Non-Reality of Free Will: "As with dual control, the libertarian needs to claim that when agents make free choices, it would have been rational (reasonable, sensible) for them to have made a contradictory choice (e.g. chosen not A rather than A) under precisely the conditions that actually obtain. →

I'd also quibble at least a tiny bit on the number; it should be (1+) :)

← Otherwise, categorical freedom simply gives us the freedom to choose irrationally had we chosen otherwise, a less-than-entirely desirable state. Kane (1985) spends a great deal of effort in trying to show how libertarian choices can be dually rational, and I examine his efforts in Chapter 8."

You're not making a choice if there's just 1 live option.

A lot of people don't consider that a "choice", but I'm not entirely convinced it's distinct

Yeah, exactly... that's the reaction I expect :)

Now, I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that maybe previous choices led to there currently being only one course of action.

There's at least a context in which that thing you do is a goal oriented behavior acted on with intention

Sure, but without choices doesn't goal-oriented behavior reduce to fate? :-p

I think it's just academic though... in practice I think all goal oriented behaviors break down into multiple smaller "plans", though not necessarily conscious

Sort of, but it's distinct from falling rocks in some interesting ways

What's not academic is if we're making worse choices than we could be, because we misunderstand how free will works. For example, if we don't realize how much momentum is built up in habits and that changing those habits is something that can be intentionally done, but only intelligently done.

I invented a term "small Δv-model of free will", in analogy to satellites which have very limited rocket fuel; operators must therefore very carefully plan out the various burns required to get those satellites to various places in the solar system.

That sounds like too much effort

When it comes to altering institutions, there is an added requirement that often you have to apply pressures to multiple points simultaneously. Otherwise there are powerful restorative forces which cancel out any attempt to change things.

(Incidentally I'm not as big a Veritasium fan as this might make me sound like; it's just that these happen to be his videos)

Haha. The title of that reminds me of What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, which I saw someone reading on the plane once and led me to Grossberg 1999 "The Link between Brain Learning, Attention, and Consciousness".

fascinating paper on how if patterns if our consciousness do not sufficiently well-match patterns in our percepts, we may never become conscious of them

You lost me with that last sentence

@HWalters But the proper response to that video I think is Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk Do schools kill creativity?

I've written a partial tutorial on Grossberg 1999, if you're really interested. Actually, it balances plasticity and solidity, which is related to this discussion.

Have you encountered Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary? He argues that the dominant analytical, left-brain emphasis of the West is a bad thing. Unlike most right- vs. left-brain dichotomies, he deploys a ton of scientific research to make his argument.

A snippet: "If it is true that attention changes the nature of what we find, how do we decide the most appropriate attention for that? One that tries to ignore the inwardness of experience?" (29)

I think the reason I got lost was grammatical; that blog post makes perfect sense (and unless LTM is meant to be distinct from what's traditionally held to be LTM, I'd add that MTM and STM also affect percepts)

LTM is sadly meant to be quite distinct

By that definition of LTM it seems to be apt

Grossberg means rapidity of response aka plasticity, not memory which lasts for years vs. a few hours.

Optical illusions are something I had obsessed over for quite a bit; I can easily relate this to illusions

There's a famous one made of dots where some of the dots arrange into a dog image; it's very difficult to spot at once, but once you spot the dog, you can't avoid seeing it

What's even more interesting is that the effect seems permanent

Huh, I've seen quite a few but I do not recall that one.

But now you're tempting me to talk about theory-ladenness of observation, which is a bit different from free will. :-p

Maybe it's not so different

And even if it were, it may be relevant

When light falls on our retina, it's just a bunch of photons with varying intensities... there aren't really "colors" yet, or "objects", or even things like "the same object having moved a bit"

Through the act of perception, which begins in the retina, these become the high level types of categories we tend to deal with (to model/predict the world, orient our goals towards, etc)... at this stage it stops becoming "a bunch of stuff" and starts to take on teleological properties

It's those sort of things... "cups" with "drink" in them related to sensations of "thirst", that feed the contents of pre-rational and rational thoughts about which we plan goals

Some of them "habitual", like "drinking from cups", cups being "things that we drink from" (relating to functional-fixedness like tendencies)

That sort of thing can sketch into another falsifiable aspect of CFW; if the thing that eventually winds up having us select A as opposed to B is different than the kinds of things we can think of (the actual properties of A), but is more like "a bit more light is hitting this spot", then we're not choosing based on consideration of those things

I'm not quite ready to accept that the different photons coming to me from the ruler on my desk have no correlation "out there" in reality. Whether it's something like quantum discord or another kind of correlation, I'm not ready to rule all that out and go Humean with unordered sense impressions.

It's got correlation, of course. But photons aren't rulers, and rulers per se are just categories convenient for us to work with (a "solid object" is often a thing we can separately manipulate... it's something "clumped together" on the scale of our actions)

The conceived "ruler-ness" of the ruler happens a bit further downstream (though processing does begin in the retina itself)

If the observation process involves us somehow becoming entangled with the ruler to the slightest bit such that it is proper to say there is shared state, I'm not quite sure what that does to your "photons aren't rulers".

Let me give another example; consider the letter "i" on your screen

We have to be careful here to not so sunder thought from matter that Descartes' dualism rears its head and sends us into radical skepticism.

That consists of something like a shape rendered in one location, and a dot over it; both are part of the same entity

The same with those two smudges that make a semicolon

We perceive those entities, but there's nothing "absolute" about those entities. They're basically conceptual clumps. In this regard they're based on cultural agreements.

I'm inclined to trace written symbolic communication back to Michael Tomasello's idea of "shared intentionality" in A Natural History of Human Thinking, whereby it was the need to communicate about the same goal between differentiated roles which led to verbal and gesture-based communication.

The "i"-ness of the i, in terms of perception, occurs mainly downstream in our brain processing (beginning with some edge detection in our retina)

That is a bit different from mere cultural agreement because we were really trying to do something together, in reality, which served as the common touchstone for setting up the symbolic communication.

It's related to our "habits"; our culturally trained brains. But despite this being entirely cultural, we can't even look at words without reading them

I think your criticism's losing a bit of focus from what I'm conveying

Yes I was getting that impression too.

I'm not proposing anything wild going on here... only properties of perception

Think of it this way... if I were to try to write a program that would look at an image, and count the pennies in it, there's a lot of work ahead of me

It doesn't help me in writing my program to know that the image "has pennies in it"; I have to write a bunch of code and figure out how to spot the pennies

Yeah … but common philosophical ways of viewing perception—as a passive process whereby you do not causally impinge on the entity being observed—are actually what made the measurement problem a shocking thing to us. If we actually took seriously that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, we'd have a philosophy of perception + action, where the two are rather interwtined.

Oh this is highly interactive

Ok, then I'll let you do some more describing. :-)

The way we work is a lot different than that program; the purpose of pointing to the program is that there's something more that needs to be done to see the pennies than just seeing the image

We're actually agents within the world. We're constantly trying to satisfy needs, developing strategies for doing so. We learn how to pick up and manipulate objects. We learn object permanence, which establishes object identities, and we do this by interacting with the world

We're also highly social; an extremely large part of what we learn is based on interacting with other people. We fairly quickly develop shared language and then things explode from there.

Sounds like phenomenology, which I think I like but need to understand better.

There's a lot of interactions going on, both interpersonal and between us and our environment, that contribute to developing these concepts in the first place

But our concepts compress into things like "categories", and some of these have "purposes"; we have "keys" that open "locks" for example

Strictly a key can do a lot of other things, but mostly we tend to think of them as opening locks, because that's the "point" of them. That type of thing is a cultural habit

As is the notion that particular objects are "keys"

So I'm not going to rant about this too much more; just sketching the basic idea's enough

It's ok; I'm patient on this topic and sufficiently interested that I'm willing to deal with the longer letter that Twain said he could make shorter with more of his time. :-)

So let me try to put this together; within our realm of experience, the kinds of things we can think about are "perceived objects". There's a lot of background processing to recognize these, or relate to them. And yes, formulating those concepts involves a lot of previous experience, memory, etc.

In addition to the perceived objects we have ideas of how they can relate to each other to accomplish goals. We also learn how to manipulate our own bodies, and develop with that skillsets and knowledge of our skillsets, that allow us to manipulate those objects

Along with this we have models of the world and us to various degrees; we also have learned "skills"; and it's with that background of material that we're able to develop plans to accomplish various goals

The consideration of alternate such plans plays a role into choices

I can choose to drink from that cup, or give the cup to a thirsty child

Simply "drinking from a cup" involves carrying out an interactive plan, involving a lot of predictions I make, live perceptions, small adjustments, with the goal-oriented behavior of causing the liquid within it to go into my mouth and ingesting it

There's a large amount of stuff that goes into volition per se, but we don't actually deal with those details; we abbreviate them

Hopefully that makes some sense; just a sketched dissection of what this stuff is down to a bit more detail

That all makes enough sense; what I'm interested in is how that detail is important for a future/past point of yours.

The past certainly plays a role in developing all of these models and capabilities. My ability to successfully work in the environment keeps me "humble" enough to attempt to adjust my models to what I think I can use. And I don't really think "future" comes into play...

...except simply as modeled actions

So that's not really "future"; it's "imagined future" or more aptly just planning

That way of thinking is part of why I have a big problem relating to LFW; PAP kind of tends to require actual "alternate futures", but I can't fit them in any relevant way to the considerations we seem to do when deliberating between choices

IOW, even if there were two alternative futures, that seems to me to be a bit irrelevant, since we don't actually travel to them and look around but rather, instead, still only model them based on what we know

@HWalters Possibly; stuff like Back From the Future does give me pause. :-p

Wait, how are the imagined futures any less real than the models of the present or past? All can have arbitrary error. And any understanding of the past or present can only really be tested by making predictions for the future, acting, then seeing if the results match the predictions.

It's not less real. It's just not really future.

We model things in the "present" moment. It's simply about what we could do.

I guess I see that as a distinction without a difference at the present (hah) moment. Why does PAP require actual alternate futures? If I'm playing with multiple imagined futures and select between them, how is that insufficient when it comes to PAP?

That's just what I imagine PAP proposes

The only why I can address would be to defer to PAP proponents :)

Or if you're trying to address my comments... the actual futures are irrelevant to what I seem to do when I decide

Hmmm, I wonder if that's really true, or whether you (or at least scientists) really do depend on counterfactual reasoning in a way that kinda sorta requires actual futures.

So whether or not there's a sense in which both futures can happen doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I'm doing when I think I freely choose an action

It's not unheard of that I will attempt to do A instead of B, and find that A isn't actually possible

The reasoning behind whether we punish someone for making choice A vs. B seems to depend on whether that person truly had the option to choose either one.

But in those scenarios I still decided to do A

Suppose I get really angry at someone. I take a gun and point it to their head, and pull the trigger.

Why should I be more or less morally responsible based on whether the gun actually does fire?

If the person had no real option, then the response to crime is properly manipulation, which often goes by the term 'rehabilitation'.

It seems more relevant to me whether I think it would fire, and what I think would happen

That's easy: there is such a thing as culpable negligence, where ignorance is no excuse. That's where the hard facts of reality become legally relevant.

I'd agree to that... there's a sense of responsibility where something's simply up to you and you're therefore culpable, regardless

But I think that's a bit of a different type of situation

Ok. I'm still going to maintain that how you understand free will actually matters when it comes to assigning blame (and praise), and I have Bruce Waller's Against Moral Responsibility to back me up.

assigning/justifying/carrying out

Well, yeah, that's a major concern in the debate

Ostensibly you could get criteria of falsification out of that

In that same x-phi paper I linked to, only some people were asked: "Do you think that, when Jeremy robs the bank, he acts of his own free will?"; another set was asked: "Do you think that when Jeremy robs the bank, he’s morally blameworthy for it?"

83% of 18 agreed Jeremy was morally blameworthy

Ehhh, I think a better question is what sort of punishment or rehabilitation or whatever is right to mete out. The term "morally blameworthy" is too ambiguous.

I'm not sure that would be a better question based on what's being studied

Asking what sort of punishment/rehabilitation is right to mete out seems a bit leading, which would defeat the purpose of that kind of study

There may be a better way to ask such a question that reflects this concern though, but I don't actually do x-phi so not sure what good it'd do bringing it up

Suffice it to say that there are many different ways to be "morally blameworthy", some of which are more severe than others in the kinds of consequences society generally visits on people. Those differences are sometimes completely artificial, sometimes prejudiced, but they're not entirely fictional, either.

It sounds like a good objection

Furthermore, how you think of the range of different possibilities may well differ based on your understanding of free will.

I'm happy to let an x-phi expert figure out how to probe those differences. :-)

I'd also be happy seeing larger, more randomly selected, cross cultural studies

(There are a few cross cultural studies I think, but there's a lot of room for more rigor; I don't think this is limited to x-phi studies but, it certainly affects them)

Oh you mean a lot of studies are awfully WASPish?

They're very limited; in this particular study we have about 40 people

Well in that case we as a society might have to change how much we value learning such things about more than a very restricted subset of the population.

"Participants in these studies are generally either undergraduate students or participants recruited online (for example, through Amazon Mechanical Turk), though they are notable exceptions, that we will point out."

That suggests non-random

It's very easy to see potential confounders in samples like this

Well there's just no way you can get statistical significance and control for culture and other factors with a very multicultural N = 40, so it's probably intelligent to be limited.

So, yeah, studies like this are great "explorations" and "starting points", but I can't take them too seriously

Sure. But sometimes getting the starting point out there is the hardest part.

I'm currently working on getting private funding for a study of how scientists use papers, spread and consume knowledge amongst themselves, etc. The US government would not fund it. Even though after some preliminary results showing that this is a promising area of study, money will probably pour in.

I agree... they do have some value, and at least mean something, which is why I'm not shy referring to it

That sounds interesting

Imagine if it could make scientists 0.01% more productive. How much money is that, globally, over a few years?

Probably would be a bigger impact if you could convince journalists to look at them :)

Hey the Veritasium vid The Science of Thinking was pretty neat. Do they do journal article dumps of stuff related to the ep?

*cough* One step at a time.

Possibly just stuff in the description section

Typically that's all you're likely to expect from popsci youtubers

Drew is just a lazy bastard I guess

"This video was inspired by the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman"

That's your reference

Ah ok; thanks—I'm pretty sure Kahneman cites stuff. Although when I started looking at the citations for What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, I found that they didn't always support the point being made. But hey, scientists do that too in their peer-reviewed papers.

I did that myself... I cited a YT interview with Searle earlier here; Searle tends to agree with Conifold that compatibilism's a kind of copout. The thing is, though, from that interview it's very apparent how Searle's appealing to intuitions

I'm not sure if that's the same thing; for me, I'm not actually bothered that Searle agreed with Conifold on compatibilism being a copout; I was only pointing out Searle's unabashed appeal to intuition

Hmmm, there is some nuance. From Nahmias 2014: "In this paper we provide evidence suggesting that most people do not view the possibility of neuro-prediction as a threat to free will unless it also raises concerns about manipulation of the agent’s behavior."

That should be Nahmias & Shepard 2014. My wife has altered me to the curse of there not being a robust, established way to identify co-first authors.